Powering Our Robot Overlords

Datacentres are big business, and vast numbers of them are being built around the world. In the UK, Amazon has announced plans to invest £8bn over the next five years building new datacentres, £3bn has been spent in the UK by Amazon’s cloud computing business since 2020 and Google is spending millions on a new centre in Hertfordshire.

All this data handling is necessary because we're storing more of it and making more complex AI internet searches. The energy cost of this shift is so huge that the big tech companies are commissioning their own nuclear power stations. Each data centre requires energy to run and vast quantities of water to cool it. Both have significant environmental costs, particularly in the hottest and driest regions. Google's greenhouse gas emissions have increased by nearly 50% in the past five years, largely due to the energy demands of Artificial Intelligence.

Tom Heap and Helen Czerski ask if we really need to handle all this data. Are there more efficient ways for us to store and search or should we be coming up with more efficient data centres which exploit renewable energy resources and cool themselves naturally with seawater or Arctic ice?

To answer these big questions for our internet future they're joined by Tom Jackson, Professor of Information and Knowledge Management at Loughborough University Business School, Aurora Gomez Delgado from the campaign group Tu Nube Seca Mi Río (Your Cloud is Drying My River) and Mark Bjornsgaard from the data centre company, Deep Green.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Rare Earth is produced in association with the Open University